University of California Santa Barbara

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major driver of shifts in the Earth’s climate, and in the past too little CO2 has been associated with triggering ice ages. Now a team of scientists has found a surprising new mechanism that could lead to ice ages: Tropical tectonic activity.

​In what may be seen as a worrying development to those troubled by the growth of the surveillance state, researchers at the University of California have demonstrated that they can count people through walls using only Wi-Fi signals.

Described as the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera, a new instrument dubbed DARKNESS is designed to filter out the blinding light of stars to see orbiting exoplanets in more detail than ever before.

According to new research, the colossal caldera of the Yellowstone supervolcano was created by not one, but two powerful and closely spaced eruptions that took place some 630,000 years ago. The eruptions were powerful enough to affect the global climate as the planet was recovering from an ice age.

Thanks to a global network of 18 robotic telescopes, researchers caught a brief blue glow in the sky which, they say, was the result of a different kind of supernova explosion. The find reveals surprising information about the companion star next to the white dwarf that sparked the spectacle.

A team at UC Santa Barbara has developed a system that uses image stacking to adjust the composition of a photo after it's been taken. Working with Nvidia, the team says the "computational zoom" system can create images that, in some cases, couldn't be captured with a normal camera.

The bacteria Shewanella oneidensis is useful for cleaning water and generates electricity while it chows down. Now, researchers at UCSB have chemically modified the bacteria to increase its energy production, which could lead to wastewater treatment plants that generate some of their own power.

With various “de-extinction” projects in the works right now, researchers have published a paper analyzing the ecological benefits, risks and responsibilities of reintroducing once-extinct species into modern ecosystems.

An international team of researchers has found a way to create microscopically-small lasers directly from silicon, unlocking the possibilities of direct integration of photonics on silicon, and a significant step towards light-based computers.